An Anecdote on Deuteronomy

Steph, I was just thinking about that piece. All Barbara did was read the Bible and use a magic marker on all the stupid and/or crazy quotations. It’s beautiful in its simplicity.

Here’s a favorite of mine I was thinking about:

Deut. 25:11,12 - A woman who seizes a man's genitals, even to defend her husband from an attacker, must have her hand cut off.

What weird, sick mentality could come up with a moral directive like the above? Let me get this straight, I asked my self. My wife and I are sitting by the fireplace enjoying the pleasures of connubial life, when the door opens and some intruder, some guttersnipe, barges in.

You, being closer to the door, bravely jump up to confront the trespasser and by accident in the heat of the turmoil, happen to grab his dick! I then jump up and hit the blackguard with a frying pan that just happens to be handy to fry hot dogs in the fireplace.

Knocked out cold, we blow the whistle; the authorities come and carry the malefactor off to jail (if he’s lucky).

But then, by the Bible’s direction (it’s the word of God, you know, so I must obey) I sadly say, “Sorry, my dear, but Deuteronomy 25: 11,12 commands me to chop your hand off at the wrist so you won’t be able to grab any more dicks, (and if it were a big one, schlongs. Yiddish can be handy sometime.)

No wonder human history is so screwed up. There’s no moral guide other that this Biblical horseshit.

Here’s another beauty. It’s fun to quote some of this stuff to believers just to see their face. Let’s say you’re at work and you happen to have a lady boss. The kind that wears a crucifix around her neck on the job. So you mess up and she comes running over to berate and scold you for dropping French fries on the floor. Hit her with this one:

1 Tim. 2:11-14 - A woman must not teach, or hold authority over a man, but must "learn in silence with all subjection," because "Adam was not deceived, but the woman being deceived was in the transgression."

If anyone would like to read Barbara’s entire compilation, it’s the epilogue to Mirror Reversal. Click on the “Atheist Novel” to the right. It’s worth five bucks just to read the entire list. It doesn’t get any funnier and crazier than this. Albert Camus had it right, “The world is surreal.”

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Talk about cherry picking! An earlier blog post illustrates the point emphatically. General Petraeus broke the sixth commandment the way congresspersons break the one about “thou shalt not steal.” As lawyers say, he knew the woman carnally and she wasn’t his wife. The shame of it. They caught him with his pants down.

So where are all the pastors screaming Deuteronomy 12:12. Adulterers must be killed.

It was so blatantly a sin against heaven that the only debate should have been, do we use the electric chair or the firing squad.

This Deuteronomy verse has me wondering about the pagan roots of the Old Testament. Was this derived from sort of cult of phallic worship or something? "Hey Ladies, the sacred junk is too holy for you to glom onto OK!"

Funny thing is, there is a passage in the Old Testament somewhere about how a man with missing testicles cannot enter the Temple - presumably God thought only real men were holy enough to be there - but there is a passage in the New Testament where Jesus says that some men have made themselves eunuchs "for the sake of the Kingdom of Heaven" (Matthew 19:12). Seems like God can't make up his mind about whether male genitalia is holy or not!

The hell of it is, the bible is lousy with stuff like that, and as you well know, the Skeptic's Annotated Bible documents a lot if not all of them. What astonishes me is that the believers who purport to "know" the bible either aren't aware of these verses or try desperately to justify them to those who don't believe that crap.